Thursday, December 02, 2010

Wikileaks: Getting serious for a moment

David Seaton's News Links

For the time being the USA is the major pillar of stability of some sort that the world has. Like it or not, that is a fact. Anything that affects that stability causes extremely unpredictable outcomes, blowback and damage everywhere. I am certainly not "pro status quo", but on the other hand neither am I a nihilist or an anarchist or a juvenile delinquent. At some point frivolity becomes a mortal sin... America is fast reaching or may have already overshot that point by some distance.

There is something very few people in the blogosphere seem to taking into account in talking about Wikileaks. Right now we are living a moment of tremendous economic instability and turbulence... not to mention two wars running and two more (Iran and Korea) waiting in the wings, world food prices are rising... it goes on and on. Bad times, the worst times since the 1930s, and you may remember how they ended.

Obviously this is a moment where those who have been chosen (democratically or otherwise) to take decisions which affect the lives, income and welfare of millions of people should be able to communicate frankly and calmly with each other and reach agreements quickly.

To put it mildly, people like Julian Assange or Glenn Beck are not helpful right now. To tolerate them is frivolous.

What irritates me especially in the middle of all this is the monumental incoherence and myopia of those who applaud and enable the tactics of Wikileaks.

If the powerful of the world are as evil, brutal, venal and unscrupulous as the Wikileaks data-dump makes them out to be... and they could be all of that, and much, much worse, do you think that they are just going to sit back quietly and watch while the "truth" sets us "free"?

Only a fool could believe that.

This is like going up to a Mafia hit-man and squirting him with a water pistol.

What we are going to get from this, minimally, is an "Official Secrets Act" like the British have and if that don't get it, there will be legislation passed that, if necessary, will rival "China's Great Firewall"... don't doubt if for a minute. And I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if the Newspapers that are publishing the material come to regret having done so.

No problem, a Gulf of Tonkin provocation is engineered and we actually declare war on Iran.

But that would have terrible consequences, you say, it would damage the economy and many people would die.

Don't think for a minute that the people who started such a war would lose money on the deal or send their sons to fight in it.

I would like a revolution as much as the next man, but Wikileaks isn't going to bring a revolution, it is going to bring a counterrevolution... And that may be what is behind it all in the first place. DS

5 comments:

Wikileaks will not be bringing on an Official Secrets Act. Our boundless, cringing fear of life since 9/11 and its attendant thirst for security have that trend in modern America all sewn up, regardless of who may or may not be manipulating whom. The frivolousness, like the counter-revolution, has been around for awhile now, say, since President Jellybean and his horoscope-devoted wife and their shining citadel on the hill. Julian Assange is bringing nothing down on our heads. We surrendered them a long time ago.

Completely disagree. Have you no appreciation for the 'hackers vs the suits?" It's kinda key and it's been going on for decades, way back when the internets only allowed techies to post 'blogs' and share news. I don't think you and I even agree what wikileaks 'is'....

In a way, the nation state is dead or dying and Julian Assange is simply a stateless media, a tool to get in btwn the source and gov't, it's sort of brilliant, I'm starting to think you may take issue with shedding light on truth.

That is, in fact, what he's doing, if it's inconvenient and you think it will impact the economy, I just can't follow how you connect the dots. It's about the people vs the government, if you don't get that, I suppose one can understand your perception of Assange. You've gotten personal about him in the past, his looks, his hair, dunno, he looks like any other guy from some continent to me.

You live 'abroad', you hang out with international types, spies, if only in the same cafe, absolutely crappy diplomats that live all over, gosh, maybe I've lived in too many places, but the things I've seen, the idiots I've met in this mix. oh dear, oh dear, we'll have to agree to disagree on this one..